fashioned with heart and hands and song
by ReWhite
Summary: In Jim's head, there is a red door. Behind the door is the black space hidden in the creases of the tightly folded gray matter that makes up his brain. Behind the door is whatever there is beyond the thing space is expanding into.


**Title**: Fashioned with hands, and heart and song  
**Pairing**: Implied Kirk/McCoy, (Kirk/Pike)  
**Rating/Warnings**: PG-13 (Explicit themes hinted at)

**Disclaimer**: I do not claim ownership of these characters, nor do I court any profits.

**Beta Note**: I do not deserve either Near_Family or Leftarrow", but I am damn thankful for them.

* * *

In Jim's head, there is a red door. Behind the door is the black space hidden in the creases of the tightly folded gray matter that makes up his brain. Behind the door is whatever there is beyond the thing space is expanding into.

* * *

Jim lasts three days under the agonizer before he decides to walk through it.

* * *

On the other side of the red door Jim is building a fantastic contraption. It is one part _Enterprise_, one part Iowan farmhouse and precisely eleven point three minutes of audio from the _Kelvin_. It has four antique wheels from a cherry red 21st century hot rod and the squeaky leather couch he used to sleep on in Winona's office back in the Riverside shipyard.

Jim watches it flex and change with a growing sense of pleasure. It's not complete, but he thinks he knows where all the pieces go.

He doesn't hear (want) the frantic pounding on the other side of the red door.

* * *

"Come on, Jim. We're home. We're safe. _Come back_."

* * *

Jim loves many things. Apples and great heights, the way a beautiful woman will sometimes snort unexpectedly when she laughs, and the curve of Bones' mouth when he smiles. Jim takes all those things and carefully applies them to his contraption, waiting to see how they fit among the moving parts of his great machine before deciding to keep them there.

It's delicate work, building his ship, and he can't rush.

* * *

Spock tries to reach Jim, but the effort leaves him shaky and ashen. In his compromised condition he cannot maintain a meld and also seek out Jim. Leonard proposes to act as Spock's proxy, his offer a clear indication of their desperation.

Four minutes into the meld, the doctor begins to sob uncontrollably and Spock is forced to break it off with less than his customary care. He is shaken, profoundly, by the doctor's tears.

Uhura leads a gasping Leonard away and he does not return to Jim's bedside for eleven hours.

* * *

Orion Prime has no word for brother and eighty-seven for sister. Gaila called Jim the fourteenth variation. Behind the red door, Jim stretches the word out between his hands and smiles at the way it feels warm and alive between his fingers, humming with a green tinged sweetness. He tastes it experimentally and is pleased when it reminds him of mint candy.

Jim was never a very good brother, but he liked being someone's sister. He carefully strings up the word across the hull of his shipthing.

* * *

When Leonard is in control of himself again he tells them to call Pike. When Spock asks why, he takes a damp, unsteady breath and says, "There's something behind the door." His hands ache and it's not real, it's not real, but then why do his knuckles throb?

Jim is behind the door that isn't real and behind the door -

"There's a ship," he whispers.

* * *

One corner of the ship is dried and withered, the brittle yellow of a long dead thing bleached under a too-hot sun. It's dirt, disease and hunger. It hurts to look at, so Jim mostly doesn't.

* * *

Christopher Pike considers the door, the shifting landscape of Jim's internal world and the bone deep fear nesting in his not inconsiderable sense of bravery.

There are scratches and blood smears on the door, probably from where McCoy beat his fists against it, desperately trying to get Jim's attention and that is a very _strange_ thought to have, a profoundly _wrong_ thought, so he carefully turns away from it.

There are many things to be afraid of here.

Pike raises his hand and knocks.

* * *

"Just bring him back. I don't care what it takes."

* * *

It's Jim, blue-eyed and painfully young, nervously biting his lip as he stares at Pike, unsure and expectant in a vast black sea of diamond-bright stars.

Pike ignores the endless nothing under his feet. "Hello, Jim."

Jim gives him a weary half-smile. "Hi."

There's something in Jim's hands, a song sung in a man's voice, dark and sure, made soft with a long drawl and gently rolling consonants. "I wish Bones sang more. I'd turn all his songs into a giant sail and it'd catch wind and hydrogen, and deuterium, like a Bussard ramscoop, only better."

Pike watches Jim carefully pull it apart, a note at a time."I'll make this one into my ship's flag," he says.

Pike raises his eyes to the massive, humming thing above their heads.

"Do you like it?"

"It's beautiful."

And it is. Twisting and streamlined, a marvelous tangle of math and light and a distant kind of laughter. Jim's ship/machine/heartthing is a harmogeny of memory, desire and physics. It's _**beautiful**_. Staggeringly, unspeakably beautiful. But it's awful too, in a way only the most absolutely pure things can be and Pike is afraid that if he looks at it too long his heart will burn into ash. So he looks to Jim instead.

"Beautiful," he says again.

Jim smiles brilliantly and the stars in his universe seem to brighten.

Pike kneels and carefully takes one fine-boned hand in his.

"It's time to come back, Jim."

All at once the stars go out, a clean sweep of pressing darkness. Jim pulls away and the beating heart of his shipmachine is impossibly loud, screaming metal and the great yawning cry of a warp core turbine. For a moment, just a moment, Pike feels the cold stab of panic, is paralyzed by the howl of a million angry moving parts in the darkness. He's afraid of this Jim. This Jim-behind-the-door, builder of wonderful, terrible things.

Even so, Christopher Pike refuses to be cowed by fucked up brain-hearts.

"That's _enough_, Jim."

Dead silence and the weary flicker of star light. Jim is skinnier now, gaunt, with bare bloodied feet and yellow dirt caked under his nails, small and delicate in the fragile light of his sad, desperate stars.

"Please. I don't want to go." Jim takes Pike's hands and pulls, small dirty fingers clutching his. "You don't have to go either. You can stay with me and we can finish the ship and sail away."

Pike can't look away from Jim's agonized figure or the naked longing on his young face. Pike's will and sanity flay a bit along the edges, subtly unraveling like the ragged ends of a knit scarf. Pike takes a deep breath, the rational part of his mind noting that in reality, he's doing no such thing, because this_ isn't real_.

"Jim," he says, reaching out to wipe away a swath of dirt from Jim's cheek with the cuff of his uniform, "let's make a wager." Jim frowns and wrinkles his nose at Pike's ministrations.

"What kind of wager?"

"If I can guess your ship's name, you come back with me."

Jim tips his head, thinking, and Pike tries not to be unnerved by the way Jim's clockwork ship seems to hum curiously, as though considering the offer. "And if you don't?"

"I stay."

Jim smiles, like a boy with a secret. "Deal."

* * *

There's a ship in Pike's heart, too.

* * *

Jim's face crumples. "You cheated," he whispers and the stars seem to wobble.

There's a low, forlorn moan from the huge, pulsing heart of Jim's ship.

This-Jim-behind-the-door is young, but not that young, too old certainly to be picked up and carried, but Pike reaches for him anyway. Skinny arms wrap around his neck and long coltish legs circle Pike's waist.

"No," he says softy, brushing his fingers across corn-silked hair. "I named my ship the same thing."

* * *

In Jim's head there is a red door, and beyond it is a great ship-shaped machine powered by dreams and memories and the heart-sick longing of a boy who belongs to the stars.

* * *

"Jim?"

"Hey, Bones."


End file.
